The one band Eric Clapton said was never going to work: “A completely impossible situation”
Eric Clapton didn’t grow up thinking that he was going to be in one band for the rest of his life.
Some of his biggest heroes were always blues troubadours looking to find the right set of musicians behind them, and ‘Slowhand’ seemed to be on that same journey once he started flying solo after the Yardbirds. He may have had a wilderness period working with some of the greatest supergroups of all time, but not everything was going to work out the way he thought it would when he started putting together his dream lineups.
Then again, it’s not like he was losing any sleep over walking away from The Yardbirds in the mid-1960s. It was a great place for him to start, but after spending so much time working on his blues chops, the thought of him playing a more pop-flavoured version of the blues never sat well with him. He wanted the opportunity to make his own blues legacy, and working with John Mayall was the first time that he really started to hone his craft the way that he wanted to. But even then, Clapton realised that he needed a different band to give him some sort of challenge.
And when Cream came along, he was going to be given a run for his money every time they played. He had been trained in the blues, but with some of the greatest jazz players soloing alongside him, it was impossible for him to keep up with what they could do when they kicked into their signature jams. But after one too many arguments between Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce, Clapton realised that he needed to find a better outlet for his playing.
He couldn’t handle the idea of fighting amongst his bandmates every single time he went into the studio, so Blind Faith may as well have been a way for him to recover. Steve Winwood was the perfect vocalist for the project, and while Baker might not have been invited to join by any stretch, hearing his drums pummelling away in the background of tunes like ‘Can’t Find My Way Home’ did help them get their only major hit.
Clapton even got the chance to hone his songwriting talents on tracks like ‘Presence of the Lord’, but there were pieces of the band that were doomed from the start. Even if we ignore the fact that there was a lewd image of an underage girl on the cover, the idea of them going on tour with only one album of material wasn’t going to help them build a foundation, especially with people still yelling at them to play both Cream and Traffic songs in between their initial jams.
The guitar legend wanted to keep the band going, but even a few years after they broke up, Clapton had to admit that the band never stood a chance, saying, “Well, it was … it was very frail. And in the context of something like Madison Square Garden, where you’ve got many thousands of people who’ve seen hundreds of better bands. And you’ve got this fantastically kind of fragile thing on stage, and you’re trying to keep it tight and do what you think the audience deserves, and they’re all screaming and shouting. It’s a completely impossible situation.”
If there was any silver lining to the record, though, Clapton did at least learn from his mistakes when he put together Derek and the Dominos. He knew exactly what he was going to be getting out of Winwood and Baker whenever he played with them, but since Bobby Whitlock and Duane Allman had been born and bred on the music that Clapton loved, they would be able to create the sounds he heard in his head when putting together songs like ‘Layla’ and ‘Bell Bottom Blues’.
So while Blind Faith may have been the sacrificial lamb for Clapton to create his next masterpiece, that doesn’t mean that they didn’t have potential. They had all the talent that a great supergroup needed to have, and had they made a few tweaks along the way, maybe that could have had the potential to rival Cream, but it just wasn’t in the cards for Clapton.
